OT said
Ted Bundy was from a very dysfunctional family- child of an unwed mother that moved in with her parents and tried to pass Ted off as her adopted stepbrother -the grandfather they lived with was mentally unstable and quite violent to all in the household...
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Mother Teresa was born in war wracked Albania to Catholic refugees. Her father died when she was only eight years old. Ted Bundy had things pretty darn good compared to a lot of people!
Theodore Robert Cowell was born on November 24, 1946 to Louise Cowell following her stay of three months at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Vermont. Ted's biological father, who was an Air Force veteran, was unknown to his son throughout his life. Shortly after his birth, Ted and his mother moved back to the home of his grandparents in Philadelphia. While growing up, Ted was led to believe that his grandparents were his parents and his natural mother was his older sister. The charade was created in order to protect his biological mother from harsh criticism and prejudice of being an unwed mother.
At the age of four, Ted and his mother moved to Tacoma, Washington to live with relatives. A year after the move, Louise fell in love with a military cook named Johnnie Culpepper Bundy. In May 1951, the couple was married and Ted assumed his stepfather's last name, which he would keep for the rest of his life.
Over the years, the Bundy family added four other siblings, who Ted spent much of his time babysitting after school. Ted's stepfather tried to form a bond between himself and Ted by including him in camping trips and other father-son activities. However, Johnnie's attempts were unsuccessful and Ted remained emotionally detached from his stepfather. According to Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth's book Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer, Ted became increasingly uncomfortable around his stepfather and preferred to be alone. This desire to be by himself increased and possibly led to his later inability to socially interact comfortably with others.
As a youth, Ted was terribly shy, self-doubting and uncomfortable in social situations. He was often teased and made the butt of pranks by bullies in his junior high school. Michaud analyzed Ted's behavior and decided that he was "not like other children, he looked and acted like them, but he was haunted by something else: a fear, a doubt -- sometimes only a vague uneasiness-— that inhabited his mind with the subtlety of a cat. He felt it for years, but he didn't recognize it for what it was until much later." Regardless of the humiliating experiences he sometimes suffered from being different, he was able to maintain a high grade-point average that would continue throughout high school and later into college.
During his high school years, Ted appeared to blossom into a more gregarious young man. His popularity increased significantly and he was considered to be "well dressed and exceptionally well mannered." Despite his emerging popularity, Ted seldom dated. His interests lay more in extra-curricular activities such as skiing and politics. In fact, Ted had a particular fascination with politics, an interest that would years later temporarily land him in the political arena.
Following high school, Ted attended college at the University of Puget Sound and the University of Washington. He worked his way through school by taking on several low-level jobs, such as a bus boy and shoe clerk. However, he seldom stayed with one position for very long. His employers considered him to be unreliable.
Although Ted was inconsistent with his work outside of school, he was very focused on his studies and grades. Yet, his focus changed during the spring of 1967 when he began a relationship that would forever change his life.
Ted met a girl that was everything he had ever dreamed of in a woman. She was a beautiful and highly sophisticated woman from a wealthy Californian family. Ted couldn't believe someone from her "class" would have an interest in someone like him. Although they had many differences, they both loved to ski and it was during their many ski trips together that he fell in love. She was really Ted's first love, and, according to Ann Rule, possibly the first woman with whom he became involved with sexually. However, she was not as infatuated with Ted as he was with her. In fact, she liked Ted a lot but believed he had no real direction or future goals. Ted tried too hard to impress her, even if that meant lying, something that she didn't like at all.
Michaud writes that Ted won a summer scholarship to the prestigious Stanford University in California just to impress her, but at Stanford, his immaturity was exposed. He writes, "Ted did not understand why the mask he had been using had failed him. This first tentative foray into the sophisticated world had ended in disaster."
In 1968, after his girlfriend graduated from the University of Washington, she broke off relations with Ted. She was a practical young woman and seemed to realize that Ted had some serious character flaws that took him out of the running as "husband material."
Ted never recovered from the break-up. Nothing, including school, seemed to hold any interest for him and he eventually dropped out, dumb-founded and depressed over the break-up. He managed to stay in touch with her by writing after she returned to California, yet she seemed uninterested in getting back together. But Ted became obsessed with this young woman and he couldn't get her out of his mind. It was an obsession that would span his lifetime and lead to a series of events that would shock the world.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/bundy/2.html
OT said
Gacy- was the son of an alcoholic father, that was both a child abuser and spouse abuser....
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Again Gacys childhood was a hell of a lot better than a lot of people who went on to be wonderful people.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/gacy/begin_2.html
Chicago's Irish inhabitants and Mr. and Mrs. John Wayne Gacy marked the day with celebration. It was St. Patrick's Day and Marion Elaine Robinson Gacy and John Wayne Gacy, Sr. welcomed their first son into the world at Edgewater Hospital in 1942. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. was the second of three children. His older sister Joanne was born two years before him and two years later came his youngest sister Karen. All of the Gacy children were raised Catholic and all three attended Catholic schools where they lived on the northern side of Chicago.
The neighborhood in which Gacy grew up was middle class and it was not uncommon for young boys to take on part-time jobs after school. Gacy was no exception and he busied himself after school with a series of part-time positions and Boy Scout activities. The young Gacy had newspaper routes and worked in a grocery store as a bag-boy and stock clerk.
Although he was not a particularly popular kid in school, he was liked by his teachers and co-workers and had made friends at school and in his Boy Scout troop. He always remained active with other children and thoroughly enjoyed outdoor scouting activities. Gacy seemed to have a very normal childhood with the exception of his relationship with his father and a series of accidents that affected him.
When Gacy was eleven years old he was playing by a swing set when he was hit in the head by one of the swings. The accident caused a blood clot in the brain. However, the blood clot was not discovered until he was sixteen. From the age of eleven to sixteen he suffered a series of blackouts caused by the clot, yet the blackouts ceased when he was given medication to dissolve the blockage in the brain.
At the age of seventeen, Gacy was diagnosed with a non-specific heart ailment. He was hospitalized on several occasions for his problem throughout his life but they were not able to find an exact cause for the pain he was suffering. However, although he complained frequently about his heart (especially after his arrest), he never suffered any serious heart attack.
During Gacy's late teens, he suffered some turmoil with his father, although relations with his mother and sisters were very strong. John Wayne Gacy, Sr. was an abusive alcoholic who physically abused his wife and verbally assaulted his children. Although John Sr. was an unpleasant individual, young Gacy deeply loved his father and wanted desperately to gain his devotion and attention. Unfortunately, he was never able to get very close to his father before he died, something which he regretted his entire life.
OT said
As far as the Mansons, much of that was drug connected, but most were from split families...
Squeaky- had a father that both physically and sexually abused her
Blue was from a split family that had an emotionally abusive mother that kept teliing her she wished she would die...
Susan Atkins came from a very dysfunctional family-- she had alcoholic parents that were both violent to each other and to her- and saw nothing wrong when her older brother and his friends were having sex with her....
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Where are you getting your info from but I watched a show not so long ago on biography chanel on the Manson girls. Those girls were weak-willed people who were naïve, gullible and easy to lead. Manson also used LSD and amphetamines to alter their personalities to his needs. But they lead me to believe on biography that most of the girls came from good families. Its just that they got all caught up in the liberal hippie movement.
OT said
Just being from an abusive background does not mean you have to turn out to be an abuser or serial murderer- but when you look at those that are the abusers or perpetrators of violent crimes, many have that background....
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I agree but but do a web search on Karla Holmoka. Thats what shocked so many about her. She came from a good background.
The only thing that Bernardo could complain about was that when he was 16 his mother told him he was illigetimate. Big deal! Lots of kids wish they were adopted!
There are no excuses! Just choices! Buckle up, tough it out and do the best you can. Nobody said life was fair or easy.
If your parents are not suitable role models. Go to a library and read about someone who is.
But its unfair to label victims of abuse as future abusers! This is the point that im trying to make. You dont hear about the good people who have made something out of themselves. Only the wack jobs that try to use their past as an excuse<frustrating>
